Move one square per arrow, starting at the robot. These grids have no internal walls. Check every intermediate position.
(2,1) → (2,2) → (2,3) → (3,3) → (4,3)
1: B 2: C 3: A
Move one square per arrow, starting at the robot. These grids have no internal walls. Check every intermediate position.
▸ Why It Matters This worksheet introduces a brand-new kind of puzzle: instead of picturing a shape in space, your child follows a sequence of arrow commands — up, down, left, right — through a grid maze and predicts exactly where the character ends up. That's the same core skill that sits underneath actual computer programming: sequential logic, executed one instruction at a time, in order, without skipping ahead or guessing where things will probably end up. A computer never assumes, infers, or fills in gaps the way a person reading a story might — it does exactly what it's told, in exactly the order it's told, and nothing more. Learning to trace commands that literally and mechanically, with zero shortcuts, is the mental habit that underlies everything from following a recipe correctly to writing a first line of real code, and this worksheet builds that habit long before your child ever touches a keyboard. ▸ Getting Started Encourage your child to use a finger, a coin, or a small toy to physically move across the grid — one square, one command at a time — rather than trying to trace the whole path just by looking at it. Have them say each direction out loud as they move: "up... up... right... down." Speaking and moving together forces the brain to process commands one at a time instead of skimming ahead, which is exactly the discipline this puzzle is meant to build. ▸ If They Get Stuck Teach your child to mark their current square lightly in pencil after every single command, rather than only checking in at the end. If they lose track partway through, the fix isn't to guess from where they think they are — it's to go all the way back to command #1 and retrace from the beginning. In real programming, one skipped or misread instruction changes everything that follows it, and rebuilding that habit of starting over rather than patching a guess is exactly the discipline this worksheet is teaching. ▸ Praise Points Praise careful, methodical tracing over speed, especially when your child slows down to double-check: "You marked your spot after every single arrow instead of rushing through — that's exactly how real programmers work, one instruction at a time, because skipping even one changes the whole answer."
This worksheet builds sequential logic — the core programming skill of tracing up/down/left/right commands through a grid one step at a time, without skipping or guessing ahead.
Once your child can trace short command sequences reliably, move on to iq-code-maze-02, which uses longer sequences that test working memory alongside logic.